Earth is dying, and you're the last one to leave. Don't forget to turn out the lights. You're an AI, steering the last human spaceship into the great unknown, looking for a place to live. That's not an entirely new concept, but the way The Away Team is presented is pretty special indeed. You might call it "interactive fiction with a fancy interface," as it's mostly text-based. Steering the spaceship through different sectors, you search for places to ransack or explore, and then you pick the people for your away team. From there on, it's all text, and lots of it.

Your means of interacting with the crew are fairly limited, and you mostly watch the events unfold, according to whom you picked for which job. It's fairly opaque with regards to how things work under the hood, but not knowing the specifics actually prevents you from trying to game that system and it definitely helps with immersion. The writing is pretty engaging, with tons of silly technobabbel and nods to well-known science fiction stories. So far, I've seen traces of Alien, System Shock, and that traumatizing Star Trek episode where Tashy Yar died. Man, that one gave me nightmares as a kid. I'm not sure if all of these references were intentional, but I appreciate them all the same. (Worth noting that these are not direct references; they rather share some elements and the same mood, I guess") It's all really well done, and if you like Science Fiction, you'll dig The Away Team for sur...